- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- android@lemmy.world
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EU Antitrust when?
Nothing anti-trust about genuine un-rooted and un-modified devices having secure access to the play store.
It’s when you lock out phones that come from Huawei/Oppo etc. because they are Chinese, that you might be able to make a point.Google using market power to push “trust” technology bound to their Play Services (which is one of the requirements for their “Android” certificate).
It absolutely is, forcing people to use one OS on their device is insane. Fuck Google, they can take my GraphineOS Pixel 9 from my cold dead hands.
It is when the play store is not the only store allowed on devices. Their play services, with this change, are again acting as a monopoly, and again will be again be sued by the eu for violating anti trust laws.
Time to get downvoted to oblivion.
I see a lot of people questioning why Google would do this and the answer is pretty simple.
Google created a tool a long, long time ago which was meant to make sure traffic from a device was “legit”. This tool is 100% optional and app developers can use it if they would like. However, the tool was easy to bypass, so over the years Google has been making the tool harder and harder to bypass.
This article is just sharing news that Google is once again making this tool harder to bypass.
So why is Google doing this? They are doing this because they don’t want their tool to be bypassable. Their tool is worthless if it can be bypassed.
The tool in question here is the Play Integrity API (previously known as the SafetyNet Attestation API). This is a tool that is offered to app developers that app developers can take advantage of if they want. The selling point of the tool is if you have operation in your app that is critical, you can try to prevent some abuse by verifying that the app is running on a “trusted build of Android” and that the app itself has not been modified from the original. That’s all the tool does.
This isn’t a new API. This isn’t something Google is trying to force app developers to use. No. From Google’s point of view, they are just making sure their tool does it’s job properly.
As for why companies might choose to use this tool, a big reason is because Android is a huge target for fraud. Apple has locked all their stuff down so it is much harder to commit fraud on iOS (not impossible though). Although Apple offers something similar, there is generally less fraud coming from iOS devices vs Android. It’s the double-edged sword of having a more open platform.
Companies are obviously not going to be happy to be the target of fraud so they have to weigh their options. Either they block a small percentage of their users that are possibly legit by implementing Play Integrity API or they risk losing a % of their income to fraud.
Now you can disagree with the tool’s job, I’m not trying to argue whether the tool is good or bad. That is extremely subjective, but hopefully this answers why Google is making this change.
Yeah except that bot farms already use hardware that will pass the checks, unlike regular harmless users who will get hurt by this. Google comes after the good guys
on devices running Android 13 or later.
Sounds easy then: stay on the latest Lineage that does not incorporate A13.
While I wouldn’t say Google is actively hostile towards these power users,
Author is obviously sold out. Are they even trustable?
RIP banking apps and Mc Donalds on GrapheneOS
Fuck Google Play
If I don’t have Play Integrity spoofed, my iPhone friends get an error when they try to RCS message me. This pretty much breaks communication for me.
This is the future of the Big Tech Internet if we’re not careful. Attestation to be able to use communications and other websites.
I have zero problems with this on Lineage. ?? No spoofing either, just Lineage.
It doesn’t make it “tricky”, it makes it impossible.
Troja has been impossible to conquer. Until.
Seriously, what is wrong with Google?
Too big and entrenched
Google is doing this because they have incentives to do so. They want to block malicious actors like attack their platforms.
Other companies want to lock down their own apps because they don’t think users should be permitted to do anything other than use their apps exactly as they want.
I don’t like it as a user, but I also see the reason why companies want this by being on the security side of software.
This better not break GrapheneOS right when I was planning to switch to Android, or I swear I’m buying a dumb phone and Google can kiss my business goodbye forever.
If you don’t need any Google malware, you aren’t at risk.
GrapheneOS comes without them by default.
Okay? Like, ive been rawdogging this no Google GrapheneOS thing for 2 Years now, and Ive Bad not a single Problem until now
Same. The vast majority of my apps are from F-Droid or directly from the dev, and only a handful are from Google Play, and those are all on a separate profile. There’s only 2 or 3 I actually need, and I can probably work around those.
Screw you Google, my next phone will probably be a Linux phone so I don’t need to deal with this crap anymore.
The reason I felt forced to iOS. No more choice. No more GrapheneOS or CalyxOS for me. Or at least that would make my life very difficult. National ID authentication, banking apps had stopped working.
GG Google. Destroy what made Android.
I ain’t clicking on an android authority article. Does anyone know if/how this would effect Graphene?
Already does. Some apps just don’t work. It’ll notif. And say Google api failed to validate login to your Google account. Example app EBay.
Interesting. If I just don’t use any apps from the play store and only use stuff from fdroid with no play services I should see no issues though yeah?
There’s always a chance any app, even from fdroid, will require play services, but that’s still highly unlikely. You should be fine with fdroid alone, yes.
can confirm, I’m running GrapheneOS right now with F-Droid and some extra repos as my only app store, it works fine for me. but I don’t use banking apps (web browsers do fine for that), and I’m using a de-Firebase-d version of Signal (Molly F-Droid) so no issues so far with no GMS and no SafetyNet.
edit: I should add that a new GrapheneOS update just released, this is in the release notes:
- disable anti-competitive code being injected by the Play Store into apps choosing to enable “App integrity > Automatic protection” when there’s a valid Play Store source stamp signature (proving that it’s an unmodified app from the Play Store, so we aren’t disabling an integrity check) since it prevents using the apps on GrapheneOS when apps also choose to enable “App integrity > Store listing visibility” with either the “Device integrity checks” or “Strong integrity checks” values enforcing having a device licensing Google Mobile Services and running the stock OS (circumventing this is protected by the DMCA exemption for jailbreaking)
so it looks like the devs are actively working around this issue and making changes to allow those checks to pass even without the ROM licensing GMS.
The guys over at GrapheneOS removedslap Google regularly, and I love it.
Long as you beware that F droid apps could be malware or some other kind of bad actors. It’s a free range marketplace just be smart. Just because something is FOSS or open source doesn’t mean it’s free of bad stuff.
TF does eBay need the device to be verified for ?
No idea but that is one I know about. Apparently the list keeps growing of these API calls being denied or flagged.
This seems like it’ll break things like revanced, which honestly makes me sad mostly for Duolingo :(
Really hope folks find a way of spoofing this too. I’m hoping to switch to a custom ROM in the future and this doesn’t bode super well
At this point I’m leaving a paper trail in my comments. Sigh, I’ll keep it short and sweet.
If you’re using ReVanced to hack and get through Duolingo, then I think you should just drop the service. There are countless free resources out there that do a better job, and aren’t predatory or make you hate learning. Duolingo is good for beginners and about a month or two of learning. Please let that app go, especially since the CEO thinks AI is a suitable replacement for the education system…
At some point I will but I’m not currently ready to make that transition. My friend and I are using Duolingo together and the social aspect plus the familiarity of the structure have been really helpful
They walked back the ai thing (at least that’s my understanding about it, I think there was a statement about it, not that that means much) but it’s very clear it wont be something that’s likely to work for me long term
But for the time being the structure that it provides and its format has helped me build a routine and actually stay pretty consistent, and I don’t think I’m at a place yet where I can transition away from it
But I have checked out the Foss options and there were some neat supplemental tools on f-droid, and at some point I’ll go through the play store and try out direct alternatives
Is there an alternative to Google Play, because I’m assuming it wouldn’t matter as much if we had that.
It’s about faking play integrity on devices without gapps.
Wasn’t this on Pixels already?
